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JUSTICE
JOSEPH STORY

Joseph Story was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in
1779.
He graduated from Harvard in 1798, second in his class. He
was admitted
to the bar in 1801. From 1805 to 1811, Story served in the state
legislature,
Congress, and as Speaker of the Massachusetts House of
Representative.
His decision to get out of politics rested largely on his
personal belief
that allegiance to a particular party required too much
sacrifice of opinions
and feelings. At age 32 Story was appointed to the Supreme
Court
by James Madison.

Despite Story’s personal feelings on slavery (“unnecessary,
unjust,
and inhuman [and] repugnant to the general principles of justice
and humanity”;
“repugnant to...the dictates on natural religion, the
obligations of good
faith and morality and the eternal maxims of social
justice.”), he
often felt compelled to uphold slavery in his rulings.
When possible,
however, he would find ways to narrow its application.
Such a possibility
existed in the case in United States v. Amistad, and
Story
narrowly interpreted the Treaty of 1795 so as not to
apply to the Amistad case, and thus justify an order
releasing the
Africans.

Story’s impact on the evolution of law in America reaches far
beyond
his Supreme Court decisions. He wrote eleven volumes
on commentary
on various branches of American law. His frequent critic,
Oliver
Wendell Holmes, conceded that Story had “done more than any
other English-speaking
man in this century to make the law luminous and easy to
understand.”
From 1829 to 1845, Story served as Dane Professor of Law at
Harvard University.
He almost single-handedly founded the law school (which had only
one student
the year before his arrival), and under his guidance the law
school at
Harvard became the model for national, university-based legal
education
in the United States.

While serving on the Supreme Court, Story would continue to
ride
the New England circuit twice a year, holding court in
Massachusetts, Rhode
Island, New Hampshire and Maine. In order to do this, and
maintain
his teaching duties at Harvard and serve on the Supreme Court,
he traveled
more than 2000 miles a year over sometimes dangerous
roads. Despite
Story’s vast and varied duties, he seems to have liked best to
teach at
Harvard. He endearingly referred to his students there as
his “foster
children,” and one such student commented that “he never seemed
to have
been happier” than when he was at the law school.
Historians have
noted that “nowhere was his buoyant personality, his kindness,
his gift
for gab, his idealism more apparant than in the old Lecture Room
of Dane
Hall.”

At the time of his death Story was regarded as America’s
greatest
jurist. His body was buried in Mt. Auburn cemetery in
Cambridge, Mass.